Home is where your heart is

Last week I made the long sojourn to the U.S. for Thanksgiving via São Paulo and Mexico City and finally to Mexicali where my folks picked me up.

It's funny because my home has always been in Wyoming in the same red house on the top of the hill on the north side of town. In my mind, it is a fixed, immutable space where I could imagine sitting at the kitchen table or counter drinking coffee in the morning, watching the occasional cow or horse approach the back fence, listening to birds chirp, or, very rarely, see a squirrel be chased up a tree by whichever lucky mutt was part of the family. The familiar. The routine. Memories stacking up one against another of the brown cabinets and sitting clad in robes to read the paper or watch the morning news. This is not romanticized. This is the fabric of the every day home to which I have returned from every corner of the earth. The richness of the fabric was not in its presentation but in its details, the little frog figurine that hung from the bar stool counter top, the mismash of coffee mugs in the cupboard, the treasures in the junk drawer under the counter, the grandfather clock chiming on the quarter hour, my dad's storage in the cabinetry above his space... I do not know if any of this is very important, and I wondered how I would feel about not returning to that home any more.

What is even funnier is that this time I returned "home" to a place that was not home. My parents' new place in Arizona is nothing like the split-level I grew up in. But, even situated in a retirement community underneath the flat, wide skies of the desert, it maintained the heart of a home. Some of the familiar pieces of childhood made their way south to this new location, even the grandfather clock. But, I am not sure that those things really matter. It felt like home because of the people who were in it. Resuming conversations, deepening relationships, retelling stories, and returning to family made it home. The dog racing after a ball, the turkey in the roaster, getting creamed at Scrabble by my mother, Dad "resting his eyes" in his chair after making lefse, and drinking coffee around the table in the morning. These are perhaps the pieces that make a place home and I enjoyed the return.